Helen Frankenthaler

Basic Information:
1. Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City in 1928.
Art Career
1. In her early art education, she studied under Rufino Tamayo and Paul Feeley. Feeley is credited with influencing her early cubist-inspired style.
  1. Upon graduating from college in 1949, she also studied under Wallace Harrison and Hans Hofmann. In this time she also had met and had a relationship with Clement Greenberg whom she considers one of her greatest influences.
    1. In the 1950s, Frankenthaler’s works were abstract expressionist with a focus on gestural strokes and abstract organic shapes. Additionally, these works mostly had an emphasis on the center of the painting, as in her painting Orange Breaking Through (1961) .
      1. Frankenthaler’s career officially started in 1952 with her painting Mountains and Sea (1952). This painting is highly gestural and has a focus on the center of the composition.
        This piece’s medium is charcoal and oil on canvas, but most importantly it was created utilizing one of Frankenthaler’s most signature painting techniques, “soak stain”.
        This painting was created while the painting laid face-up on the floor, a technique which Frankenthaler adapted from Pollock.
        A detail to note is that the color scheme and style of this painting and other similar paintings, with a very light and airy composition, was deemed feminine and unserious by some critics. One critic referred to her work as “merely beautiful,” referring to what they perceived as a lack of substance within the paintings.
        By 1960, Frankenthaler began to do more symmetrical paintings, with less focus solely on the center of the canvas. This led to a more simplified version of her style to emerge, often with blots of solid colors on the canvas.
        In the mid-1960s, she also began to steer away from the soak stain technique, now using acrylic paint or thicker paints to achieve more bright, Fauvist- inspired colors.
        By the late-1960s, she began to use much larger forms, with more focus on gradient color mixing across the canvas, as in Indian Summer (1967) (will be discussed further below). At this time Frankenthaler was also involved in Post- painterly abstraction.
Art Style
1. Frankenthaler’s art style varies substantially throughout her career. For most of her life, her work can be identified as abstract expressionist.
  1. Many of her works focus on natural forms, utilizing fluid abstract shapes, masses, and gestural strokes. These works were often in a large format (Flood, 1967 is almost 10’ by 12’).
    1. As an abstract expressionist, Frankenthaler also highly valued spontaneity in her paintings. Her most famous painting technique was known as “soak stain.” Soak stain was the name Frankenthaler gave to her technique of painting with thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas. This technique allows the oil paint to soak into canvas which gives a very unique blending of colors often resembling watercolor. Unfortunately, this lack of barrier between the oil paint and the canvas also causes the canvas to rot over time.
      1. Another term which describes Frankenthaler’s style is color field. Color field is an art style associated with the application of large areas of a single color which may blend into other areas of color.
        These areas of color may be of a similar hue to allow more gradual color changes between areas of color. The style is also associated with large formats and simplified compositions, which are both very characteristic of Frankenthaler’s compositions.
        There are many examples of soak stain in Frankenthaler’s work, including Orange Breaking Through (1961). This painting was created while the canvas was laid on the floor to allow paint to pool together, especially intensified by the highly- diluted oil paint. This soaking also leads to the halo-like effect on the shapes, especially apparent on the orange shapes.
        This painting differs from many of Frankenthaler’s work at the time, which often utilized light, almost pastel colors.
        An example of this color scheme would be in Moving Day (1961) (pictured left). This piece utilizes light, airy colors, similar to Mountains and Sea. This piece also similarly utilizes soak stain as an oil on canvas paintings.
        Both Orange Breaking Through and Moving Day utilize lyrical gestures and abstraction. The compositions are very personal and non-objective.
        The gestural painting style gives the paintings a narrative structure and a sense of movement between the abstract shapes. This sense of movement is most apparent in Moving Day where the splatters and shapes seem to move up to the top right portion of the painting, almost seeking out the contrasting pink shape in the top right corner of the painting.
2. The gestural painting style gives the paintings a narrative structure and a sense of movement between the abstract shapes. This sense of movement is most apparent in Moving Day where the splatters and shapes seem to move up to the top right portion of the painting, almost seeking out the contrasting pink shape in the top right corner of the painting.
  1. These paintings were also extremely large. One example of these paintings is Flood (1967) . This painting is 10’ by 12’ and is acrylic on canvas. Thus, Frankenthaler did not use her soak stain technique on this painting.
    1. The title and composition reflect a theme of tides in many of Frankenthaler’s pieces of this style. There is a separation of land and water in this painting. The composition resembles a tiding going in and out, sourcing from the bottom and bottom right of the painting.
      1. The composition can also be seen as a large warm-colored cloud floating over an ocean. There are many interpretations to be made, but most importantly there is still a sense of movement despite the lack of concrete gestural strokes as in Moving Day.
        Another important aspect to note, while this painting can be seen as a landscape, it is still completely abstract. These interpretations and sense of movement do not make the painting objective.
3. Another example of these large format, large-fielded pieces by Frankenthaler is Indian Summer (1967) (pictured left). Frankenthaler also utilized acrylic on canvas for this painting. This painting may not have as concrete an image attached to it, as in the tides of Flood, but there is a sense of movement as the large pseudo-rectangular shapes seem to overtake one another, refusing to mix.
  1. There is little gradient or color mixing in this painting, differentiating it greatly from Frankenthaler’s earlier soak stain pieces. It is important to note that while they are abstract, many of Frankenthaler’s paintings do have titles which refer to specific places or concepts, as in Basque Beach (1958) and Flood.

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Helen Frankenthaler

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